Advising
As a Ph.D. student and postdoc, I co-advised several undergraduate students. Erandi Chavez worked with me (and others) on a project to understand the time evolution of Neptune’s clouds and hazes over a 30 year time span. Her two first-author papers that came out of this work show a fascinating correlation between discrete cloud activity in Neptune and the 11-year solar cycle; those are available here and here. Mallory Helfenbein worked with me on a project measuring the infrared brightness of Neptune’s small moons - her first-author publication is under review at time of writing.
Teaching
I’ve served as a Graduate Student Instructor for courses at both the intro and senior majors’ level, including Astro C10: Introduction to General Astronomy, Astro C12: The Planets, and Astro C162: Planetary Astrophysics.
I have shared my passion for the natural sciences with high school students as a volunteer teacher for Splash at Berkeley and as a panelist for the Branson school’s yearly science symposium.
Seminars
I co-organized Berkeley’s Climate and Impacts Research Hub, a monthly seminar and discussion group for early-career scientists focused on interdisciplinary research related to climate change impacts, adaptations, and solutions. We host presentations on diverse topics ranging from “Indigenous Perspectives on Climate-Change-Driven Farm Expansion in the Arctic” to “Satellite Imaging for Identification of Major Methane Leaks.” I also served as an organizer of Berkeley’s Center for Integrative Planetary Sciences seminar series.
DEI
As a White man it is my responsibility to take action to make workplaces within academia more welcoming to minoritized individuals. As a member of the Unlearning Racism in the Geosciences (URGE) Berkeley chapter, I helped re-design the Berkeley Earth and Planetary Science department’s hiring practices and onboarding to be more transparent and equitable. I have also encouraged Indigenous land acknowledgements and intentionally solicited climate-justice speakers for the Climate and Impacts Hub.